6 Essential Travel Planning Apps and Websites in 2018

Like everything you’ll read at Worldly Winos, we recommend these apps because we use them. We literally don’t book a trip without using every single one of these 6 essential travel planning apps and websites in 2018. Trust us on this, there are a lot of sites and apps that we have used and subsequently deleted because they pale in comparison.

Google Flights

Forget about Expedia, Orbitz, or any other flight booking website and start using Google Flights. Like nearly all Google products, this one is a no-frills tool that helps you do one thing: book flights easily and intelligently.

Google provides something they call “Flight Insights” where you can:

View Price Graphs that show the historical average flight prices so you can pick the best bang-for-your-buck dates to travel

Airports – find alternative airports that may have cheaper flight options but are still close to your destination. I.E. A trip to San Francisco might actually be cheaper if you fly into Oakland.

For those of you who aren’t quite sure what city you want to explore you can use the “Explore Map” feature. Just set your departure city and date range and Google will display a map of destination cities with flight prices.

If you have a destination city and travel dates in mind the price tracker feature is perfect for you. You simply select a few flights that interest you and Google Flights will start tracking them. You will receive emails any time the prices go up or down.

Last but not least, you can book flights at the click of a button. Just select you preferred flights and Google Flights will send you straight to the carrier’s website to finish booking. All flight information is pre-loaded so you just enter your personal info and carry on. All of this functionality lands Google Flights the top spot on our 6 essential travel planning apps and websites in 2018 list. If you want to learn more check out our instructional “how to” video on Google Flights on Youtube or below.

Scotts Cheap Flights

Do you ever wake up and think to yourself “I need a vacation”? If so, Scott’s Cheap Flights is your dream come true. Just sign up for his email list and he will send you notifications when airlines are offering cheap deals to great international cities. It’s literally that simple.

Depending on how serious you are there are free and paid versions. The free version only sends you 1 in every 3 deals that come up but it’s still super helpful. We use the paid version because, well, we’re obsessed with cheap flights. Simplicity and effectiveness land Scott’s Cheap Flights a spot on our 6 essential travel planning apps and websites in 2018 list.

SeatGuru

Seat what? We know, weird name but great website. With SeatGuru you can type in your flight number and it will tell you every piece of information you can dream of about your plane. Does this plane have in flight Wi-Fi? In flight Entertainment? No, seriously – some planes still don’t have these things in 2018. We flew American Airlines to Kauai out of Phoenix (~7 hours) with nothing but a book. Ugh. 1st world problems we suppose.

Want to know which seats have limited recline? Which have more legroom? Which are in high traffic potty zones? SeatGuru will tell you all of this. These may sound nit picky but they are critical when sitting on a plane for more than a few hours.

SeatGuru enables us to get some shut eye when flying economy and that’s why it’s on the 6 essential travel planning apps and websites in 2018 list.

Hotels.com

Why Hotels.com? We’ll cut to the chase – you get a free night after just 10 stays.

“Keep it simple, stupid”. Wise words that we like to follow when it comes to hotel booking. If you’re not interested in playing the points game and have no allegiance to particular hotel chain then Hotels.com is your answer. They have the simplest reward system possible. After you book 10 nights from Hotels.com you get a free night.

Opentable

Opentable is a must have for any foodie that wants to book reservations at top restaurants or bars. The interface is super intuitive and user friendly. Just tell it location, count of people in your party, and a general time. It spits back a list of top rated restaurants and the available time slots for your party. The reviews and ratings are pretty accurate in our experience. Most restaurants have an updated menu so you know what you’re getting yourself into.

They also have a reward system (we love points!) that earns you Amazon gift cards or dining credits. All you have to do is book a restaurant on their app and eat there. That’s literally it. Its about the easiest money you will ever save/make.

TripIt

We were a little late to the game on the TripIt app and website but it’s a life changer. It’s an itinerary builder that has an amazing amount of functionality for a free app. You can auto-import confirmation emails and it does all the work for you. It will place your flight info, hotel info, food tours, and more into a day-by-day planner.

Once you’ve got the basic info in, you can add collaborators to the trip. The collaborators can help you co-plan your trip. Trip sharing is another feature that allows you to give view only access to people you want to keep informed. We send these out to our loved ones so they know where the hell we are at – just in case.

We always like to keep backups of our travel documents on us and TripIt allows us to do just that with the travel document importer. You can also add travel contacts in case you forget who your tour guide is. All of this is available offline, so worry not about Wi-Fi or cell reception.

So that rounds off the list of our 6 essential travel planning apps and websites in 2018 list. We hope you seriously consider downloading or signing up to every one of these in the 10 minutes. These will change your foodie traveling life – or at least they did ours.